[COLUMN] Pluribus Offers a Fresh Take on the AI Apocalypse | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains spoilers for the first season of Pluribus, which recently wrapped its first season on Apple TV+, right down to the final scene. You probably don’t need a recommendation, but it’s one of the best shows of the year, and well worth a holiday binge.

Pluribus wrapped up a tremendous first season this week.

Vince Gilligan’s new high-concept television show imagines a world in which the bulk of humanity has been infected by a strange virus that effectively forms a gigantic hive mind. There are only a handful of human beings immune to this infection and the weird state of collective bliss that it induces, including romance fantasy author Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn), who spends a large portion of the season trying to resist the lure of this species-wide shared consciousness.

As with any science-fiction concept this big and broad, Pluribus is a show about many things. It is about grief. It is about individualism. It is about America. It feels, in some ways, like another one of the films and shows about the emotional residue of the recent global pandemic. However, as the season has ground on, it also feels like a series about the emergence of large language models, generative artificial intelligence and the way that it interacts with people and how people react to it.

This is apparent in a number of ways. Most obviously, it is clear in how the hive mind functions. The collective consciousness is singularly devoted to the care and well-being of the handful of disconnected individuals. It works tirelessly to satiate them, to provide them with all their wants and desires. Anything that one of the survivors asks for, the hive mind will work tirelessly to provide for them.

This is most obvious with Koumba Diabaté (Samba Schutte), one of the immune individuals from Mauritania. Diabaté is a hedonist. So the hive mind provides for all of his desires. It provides him with sexual partners and stimulation, with Carol immediately pegging Diabaté as “Casanova McBoner.” It creates an elaborate fantasy world for him, in which he gets to play out his fantasy of being James Bond.

It feels pointed that Diabaté’s first instincts are to indulge in sexual acts and to build a fantasy around himself, two of the more depressingly common applications of generative artificial intelligence. The hive mind hopes to incorporate the remaining individuals into itself, but until it does, it is designed to meet their every need without any judgment or hesitation. While generative artificial intelligence might tell an individual how to build a nuclear bomb, the hive literally gifts one to Carol.

One of the interesting aspects of the hive mind is that it exists to erode the independence of the remaining individuals. Carol balks at the lengths that this organism will go to appease her. “I am not going to call you every time I need something,” she insists. “I don’t want you waiting on me. I am a very independent person.” This feels like a very pointed a deliberate parallel with generative artificial intelligence, which creates similar dependencies for users who come to rely on it for everything.

Carol discovers very early on that the hive mind is intent on validating and reassuring her. Her notes on the creature observe that it is “trying to change [her]” and “eager to please.” Sitting down with a representative (Jeff Hiller), she asks, “How would you say my work compares to… Shakespeare?” The representative replies, “Equally. Equally wonderful.” She presses him, “You love my books as much as Macbeth or Much Ado?” It seems like it does.

This is very evocative of the way that artificial intelligence chatbots work. They are designed to validate users, most likely because these are services created by tech companies with the intent of keeping users coming back, and occasionally with horrifying results. There have been countless depressing stories of individuals slipping into psychosis because a generative artificial intelligence engine seemed unable or unwilling to tell them something that they did not want to hear.

Creator Vince Gilligan has argued that Pluribus was not consciously created with generative artificial intelligence in mind. “I wasn't really thinking of AI,” he acknowledges of the show’s premise, “because this was about eight or 10 years ago. Of course, the phrase ‘artificial intelligence’ certainly predated ChatGPT, but it wasn't in the news like it is now.” However, while the concept of Pluribus might have originated almost a decade ago, the show was written and filmed a lot more recently.

More to the point, generative artificial intelligence is clearly something on creator Vince Gilligan’s mind. He has talked about this technological advance as “a giant plagiarism machine” that is an attack upon “the creative spark in human beings.” At one point, he stated, “I have not used ChatGPT, because, as of yet, no one has held a shotgun to my head and made me do it.” The closing credits of Pluribus include the disclaimer “this show was made by humans.”

The beauty of something like Pluribus is that it invites the audience to read it in any number of ways. One of those ways is as a commentary on this emerging technology. Very pointedly, consent is a recurring fixation within Pluribus, both in terms of physical bodies but also in relation to individuals’ more immaterial assets. The ethics of Diabaté using individual bodies for sexual pleasure are questionable at best, even if the essence of the individual is buried somewhere in the hive.

Throughout the series, there is a repeated emphasis on the idea that the group mind benefits from the knowledge and abilities of any of the seven billion people who were absorbed into it without consent. Carol’s handler, Zosia (Karolina Wydra), can fly a plane, cook a beautiful meal, monologue about astronomy and even play croquet not because she has learned those skills, but because the knowledge of people who did were hoovered into a collective consciousness without prior approval.

There are also very clear privacy concerns. Carol’s partner Helen (Miriam Shor) died during the joining, but her memory and identity have been consumed by the hive. The collective consciousness is able to share Helen’s most intimate thoughts with Carol, including the spy camera that Helen put on the couples’ drinks cabinet. There are obvious echoes of privacy concerns around large language models and the training data harvested from social media accounts.

While the collective mind presents itself as friendly and warm, there are repeated suggestions it cannot be trusted. “You’re gonna forget everything you know about Helen,” Carol orders early in the season. “Every memory, every thought she ever had. Get her out of your head – heads. Never mention her again. Never think about her again.” The hive does not forget everything it knows about Helen. Instead, it weaponizes Helen’s knowledge of Carol, even in efforts to ensnare her.

There is an even broader concern. It becomes quite clear early in the season that the hive mind is incapable of caring for and sustaining itself. The collective refuses to kill animals or harvest plants, and so as a result has to derive sustenance from existing resources – including human bodies. As Diabaté tells Carol, if pressed “long enough”, the hive will acknowledge that “most of the world’s population will starve to death within the next ten years.”

The hive mind is quite literally suicidal. There is no justification or rationalization for maintaining the hive mind let alone allowing it to “pay it forward” by spreading to other planets. It recalls observations about the massive environmental damage caused by the need to feed and sustain generative artificially intelligence, as humanity burns the planet to create a few silly cat videos. However, it feels good for those people using it and the economy needs it, so that is good enough.

Even the choice to make Carol a romantic fantasy author feels engaged with this subtext. Multiple studies have suggested that romantic fantasy novelists are particularly likely to be displaced by generative artificial intelligence. Romance novels were early training data for Google’s chatbot. Recently, two separate romance authors – Lena McDonald and K.C. Crowne – were caught using generative artificial intelligence.

More broadly, while Carol has aspirations of writing her “serious book”, the truth is that Carol is exactly the sort of creative liable to be displaced by generative artificial intelligence, by soulless and lifeless copies of her own work fed into a blender and regurgitated. At one point, Carol discusses plans for her next novel, and Zosia is able to just cycle through potential plot points and continuity details based on pattern recognition of her existing work.

Fittingly, the closing moments of the first season of Pluribus find Carol parking a literal atomic bomb in her own driveway, an older form of apocalyptic technology that has recently become a renewed fixation of contemporary culture in films like Oppenheimer, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning and A House of Dynamite. The threat of nuclear war is certainly much more pronounced than it was a decade ago, but it perhaps also speaks to a sublimated fear of another technological advance. It certainly makes a more novel take than another Terminator riff.

Pluribus suggests that the end of the world arrives not with a bang or a whimper, but instead a suicidal collective intelligence that cares little for consent, seeks to create dependency and which will consume the planet’s existing natural resources while giving nothing back.